4/14/25
I think my problem with blogging is that I put too many expectations on myself. Like, the goal of a blog is to just sort of naturally type whatever comes into your head, and instead I spend all this time thinking about how I should have themed articles or big important updates or something meaningful (whatever the hell that means), and then I just don’t end up doing anything. So I’m going to try to be a little more freeform about the whole process in hopes that it means I can be more reliable about posting and uploading too.
I still don’t miss social media, but I have been thinking lately about how dramatically it really cuts down on the amount of people you can ‘keep in contact’ with. Not that I was interacting with everyone I was ever friends with on social media on a daily — or even weekly — basis but it did feel like I at least had a general understanding of what was going on in other people’s lives. Now, not so much. Maybe the addiction to social media that people feel is less but connection and more about the unrivaled flow of information and knowledge, the omnipotence of seeing things everywhere all at once and being able to eavesdrop on other people’s lives. I don’t know, I don’t think I miss that aspect of it, but I do miss having a cast of characters in the background of my day. It kinda sucks that’s gone, but I don’t regret it on the whole.
Over the weekend I saw The Amateur, and liked it. I didn’t love it — I don’t think there’s anything I’m really going to remember firmly about it in, say, six months — but I did think it was a perfectly capable revenge thriller. It’s kinda funny how much Jon Bernthal gets tossed around in the trailer and in the marketing (third billed!) when his screen time is maybe less than ten minutes in the whole movie. I actually think you could cut his part entirely and nobody would have noticed. Apparently his character is a big deal in the book that this movie is based on, so you kinda have to keep him in there, but I don’t think he really did anything for the movie. Not his fault, I think Bernthal is a good actor, but there wasn’t much for him to work with there. I was pleasantly surprised to see personal favorite actor Michael Stuhlbarg show up in this thing (also for maybe ten minutes of screen time), but he’s always so good, so I’ll take what I can get.
Not in the theater, I watched Tokyo Cowboy and liked it as a low-stakes sort of character-driven drama. It’s one of those movies where there’s no real surprises — if you’ve seen the trailer, you can probably suss out how the entire film is going to go, and particularly savvy viewers could even venture a really good guess as to what shot from the trailer is the actual last shot of the film — but I thought it was sweet and unassuming in a really nice way. There’s a tendency in movies like this to poke fun at one side of the ‘fish out of water’ story or the other, to lean too much into the ‘wow, those wacky uptight Japanese businessmen’ or ‘those unfocused, drunken Americans’, but this movie doesn’t really go that direction, and instead just plays out as a character piece. I thought it worked well in that regard. I did quite like a little snippet of the score that plays at the end of the movie, titled Hideki at Sunset, although I don’t think it goes on quite long enough to establish a really meaningful motif, it’s just kinda a nice brief listen. I wish it were longer, or had a little more to it.
I’m apparently 73% of the way through the book I’m reading, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and it’s been… OK. I hate getting book recommendations based on my favorite book (Donna Tart’s excellent 1992 debut, The Secret History) because the books never quite live up to the comparison. Which is tough, naturally; of course a book is going to struggle to live up to your favorite book. But so many of the books in this same vein tend to have similar problems, namely that they always feel like they’re eager to demonstrate to you just how smart and witty and educated they are. Tart’s books work because at no point do you feel like she’s telling you how smart or well educated she is, she simply is, and the writing is smart and clever because of it. This book is very much an ‘eager to impress’ type read where the author really, really wants you to know that she has definitely read a few books in her life, and here they are in citation form. Some of this can be forgiven due to the unreliable narrator presenting the story and footnoting her experiences by way of extensive book citations, but the gimmick gets old by about twenty pages in, and there’s still a lot of book left to go after that. Not massively impressed.